In Business World A website is the bread and butter of almost every business today, irrespective of the niche.
A good website that functions smoothly is, therefore, crucial for the success of your business and for this, you have to put in a lot of thought into its design. It has to be aesthetically pleasing while the backend technicalities and SEO aspects have to be taken care of for quick loading times.
Your website design has to resonate with your business identity and the products and services you provide to create a good impression for website designing.
Today, minimalist website designs are preferred because visitors fancy a clean and simplistic approach. It gives them a better user experience as the webpage is pretty straightforward.
But what are the key ingredients of a good website design?
Let’s find out!
Table of Contents
1. Robust and Minimalistic Colour Palette
Colour scheme is perhaps the most important element of website design.
Why you ask – because the colour palette you choose will be associated with your business for a long time. A great branding agency will be able to help you define the colour palette for your business in a matter that emphasizes your company values and strengths.
Generally, companies have primary and secondary colours that allow them some wiggle room when new elements of website creation are underway. This includes the making of the homepage, the About Us section, blog and the landing page to name a few.
Although, as mentioned earlier, keeping it simple is the key because using too many colours can be distracting. This is the main reason why successful website designs like Apple and Amazon opt for no more than two to three colours for all their major design aspects.
A minimalistic colour scheme makes it easier for your visitors to focus, increasing their chance of staying on the page for a longer time. This gives you the opportunity to move them further down the sales funnel.
2. Ample of White Space
White space or “empty” space is another important aspect of website design that gives you room to seamlessly incorporate all the elements (margin, copy, sidebar, etc.) present on your webpage. Your webpage should have a clean, aesthetic look and shouldn’t look too crowded. Web designs with too much information makes it rather difficult to capture a visitor’s attention.
When you have plenty of white space, your website looks organised and a lot easier to read. With website design, less is more so empty spaces will allow your visitors to navigate through the page with absolute ease.
3. Prominent Calls-to-Action
Calls-to-Action or CTA is kind of the whole point of a website.
It’s the CTA that induces visitors to take action to try out your product or service. Websites help you to connect with prospects who’re interested in what you’re offering. Once visitors land on your webpage, you need to establish a connection with them so you can get in touch.
Your call-to-action can be in the form of:
- Email Subscription
- White Papers
- Free Ebooks
- Free Consultations
- Free Product Forms
These should be placed prominently and strategically in your website design as it’ll help you get hold of your visitor’s email address. You can then connect with your prospects and convert them into promising leads eventually.
Incorporating CTAs smartly across your website is essential. Ideal places for CTAs are:
- Homepage
- Towards the End of Blog Posts
- Sidebars
- Resource and Product Pages
- Every Landing Page
4. Clean Backend Coding
A great deal of coding is involved at the backend which, although not visible, has a lot riding on it. The entire site’s performance is dictated by how well coded it is.
Investing time in ensuring clean backend coding will make your website read easier while also maintaining all site functions. If your backend coding is complicated, it’ll make it difficult for you to detect and fix issues that may crop up. It’ll be like finding a needle in the haystack so, keep it simple and easy.
5. User-Centric Design
No matter what, in order to be successful you’ve got to be user-centric and the same is applicable to website design as well!
Of course, you need to boost your rankings but that shouldn’t be your primary concern. Most businesses in their quest for better rankings tend to be more Google-centric but this will hurt your chances when it concerns potential leads.
Make sure that the design of your website is optimised to be user-friendly. For example, if you’re creating a website for a business with multiple locations, your design should be easy to delineate among those locations. There are several CMSs such as Glass website builder that offer feature-specific capabilities to make it easier for businesses to create seamless, user-friendly websites. If you’ve got this covered, rankings on search engines will definitely follow. Google understands when visitors get value from your webpage as they keep coming back and spend more time on it.
When you’re starting off, go a bit easy on the SEO and concentrate just a little bit more on building a loyal following.
6. All Things SEO
While the website should indeed be user-centric, it doesn’t mean that you completely let your eye off the SEO wall.
Several aspects of SEO go hand-in-hand with backend coding to improve the overall optimisation of your website. Various design elements come together to elevate your ranking on Google and other search engines. To name a few, these include:
- Title tag
- Meta tag
- Heading tag
- HTML coding and more
Ensure that you optimise these aspects and while ironing out discrepancies in order to stay relevant and rank better. If you need a helping hand with your SEO, get in touch with a professional company.
7. Speed Optimisation
Website speed can either make or break the deal which is why it’s crucial that you pay close attention to it. With the kind of technological advancement we’ve achieved, visitors expect pages to load at a lightning speed. If the page doesn’t load in three seconds or less, they’ll abandon your page without a second thought.
When it comes to capturing leads, as a business you don’t want to hurt your chances. Your prospects shouldn’t think negatively about your brand just because your website loading time wasn’t up to the mark.
To speed things up a bit, here’s what you could do:
- Optimise your images irrespective of their size.
- Enable file compression so that they open more quickly.
- Minimise requests for HTTP in Google Chrome’s Developer Tools.
- Select reliable hosting options whether it’s VPS or shared hosting or a dedicated server.
To Sum Up
And that covers it all!
These aspects of website design will come to your rescue and help you create a smooth user-experience with great website optimisation. This will not only improve your website’s functionality but also its physical design.
With an awesome website design, your business can capture prospects, generate leads and increase conversions.
